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Author: Francesca Beddie

Some people say a visit to Antarctica changed their life. I don’t but months after my trip the other-worldly beauty of the seventh continent is still with me and I am still grappling with how to put the experience into words. Someone who managed to capture the spirit of the place, long before the I-phone and cruise ships made it easy to photograph penguins and icebergs, was Frank Hurley.

Hurley’s photographic genius has been recorded by Alisdair McGregor. Here’s an extract from my review of the biography:

Hurley could be lyrical in conveying the personality of Antarctica. Of ice floes he wrote:

Newly born ice spotless and lily-like, larger adult masses in the pride of their beauty and gnarled decaying fragments in the senility of old age … Time will disintegrate all.

Little would Hurley have imagined how much more quickly the ice shelves are melting a century on from his first encounter with their majesty.

People in Buenos Aires, especially the locals (porteños or people of the port) don’t get much sleep. Many commute for several hours to get to and from work during the week, so they are used to eating late and rising early. On weekends, they might get to sleep in, but those who like to party won’t be adding many credits to their sleep bank because nightlife doesn’t get started till close to midnight: quite a challenge for visitors used to eating at eight and going to bed before twelve.

In local dives, musicians carry on the tradition of singing tango, yes, singing. The music and lyrics are as essential as those sexy dance moves. Elsewhere, young Argentinians are bopping to rock ‘n roll or testing out their own songs in soirees hosted in people’s flats.

One aspect of tango lyrics that intrigues me is the incorporation of vesre, a play on words that switches around the syllable of words. So, café (coffee) becomes feca, mujer (woman)/ jermu, amigo (friend)/ gomía, pizza /zapi (which is also the name of a major Argentine pizza chain).

Pity the poor student of Argentinian Spanish! And for that matter of English and its rhyming slang. Like vesre, the tradition of Cockney rhyming slang came out of the working class, people who were traders in London’s markets in the 19th century. Their slang is also confusing, and complicated. It finds an expression that rhymes with another word, which is replaced by that expression, or part of it at least. For example, the word ‘look’ rhymes with ‘butcher’s hook’ but the actual rhyming word ‘hook’ is omitted leaving the word ‘butchers’ to mean ‘look’. In the same way ‘feet’ rhymes with the word ‘meat’ in the phrase ‘plates of meat’, so in Cockney ‘feet’ are ‘plates’, while ‘teeth’ rhyme with ‘heath’, as in Hampstead Heath, so become ‘Hampsteads’. For more on these mind-frazzling expressions – not all obsolete — visit http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk

Both these versions of wordplay show us how adaptable language is and how people and cultures influence the development of dialects, vocabulary and humour in local communities and beyond. With more than 300 languages spoken in Australian homes, Australian English is, according to Ingrid Piller, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Sydney’s Macquarie University, becoming more diverse. Newcomers don’t just come to terms with colloquialisms, Cockney slang and other word forms, like ‘brekkie’ and ‘barbie’, or weird uses of words like ‘average’ to mean ‘bad’ or ‘mate’ not to mean ‘friend’. They also introduce words from their native languages and create their own versions of English, getting their revenge on the vagaries of English spelling and utter confusion of its slang.

Image: the bandoneon, an essential instrument in tango and much more complicated to play than the accordion.

If you want to write well, learn to love the full stop. See it as the goal towards which the words in your sentence adamantly move.

So advises Joe Moran, Professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University, in an article that sings the praises of that dot at the end of a sentence, a dot that is increasingly missing in social media. Studies have been done into the effect of the fullstop; these suggest that people tend to read a text message that ends with a full stop as curt or passive-aggressive. Maybe, but maybe also people just don’t text using complete sentences.

In formal writing, sentences are necessary. Here’s Moran again:

A good sentence moves smoothly and cleanly towards a stop. The best way to ensure this happens is to put the important stuff at the end. A sentence ordered like this feels more deliberate and more memorable just as, when you stop speaking, what sticks in your listener’s mind is the last thing you said. A sentence’s strongest stress falls on its last stressed syllable, just before the full stop.

Until Aristophanes of Byzantium invented the dot or periodos to signal a complete thought, sentences just went on and on and on. Here too is the origin of the American word for ‘full stop’, the ‘period’. According to Anglophile Fraser McAlpine during the 18th and 19th centuries a distinction was made between the period – the dot itself, also used then (but see below) to end abbreviations and initials – and the full stop, which was only ever used to end sentences. In the 20th century, for reasons that are not entirely apparent, the generic term for that dot shifted within British English and it became more commonly referred to as a full stop even when used for other purposes.

I’d like now to turn to one of the most surprising discussions that occurs in my training sessions: the debate about the number of spaces used after the full stop. Is it one or two? In the age of the computer and modern fonts, the answer is one. Before that, because typefaces and printing were less clear, the practice was to have a larger space between sentences. When typewriters were invented in the 1860s, typists achieved this by using two spaces. That practice was drummed into all who learned touch typing and, remarkably, seems to have carried over to many who have learned to type on a computer keyboard.

This is a matter of style not grammar, so where else, in Australia at least, to get the answer than the Style Manual, which on page 97 says:

[The full stop] should be followed by one space only.

Later on the same page and on pp 152-153, the manual gives a list of the places where not to use the full stop (note still two words). Here too the modern trend towards minimal punctuation means entrenched habits must be abandoned. For shortened words that are contractions, that is words consisting of the first and last letters of a word, no full stops are necessary.

For example: Mr Mrs Rd Qld dept

If the shortened word is an abbreviation, consisting of the first letter of the word, usually some other letters but not the last letter, the manual says to use a full stop.

For example: para. Mon. Vic. cont.

The latest edition of the manual was, however, written in 2002 and things have moved on, with these full stops now being dropped too. So, when in doubt, remember that the most important thing is to use punctuation to help your reader get your message. Full stop (period).

‘I like Putin’, a tonged-straight-haired platinum blonde declared. We were standing in a long queue to make a pitch to a publisher. Mine was about Russia and history and houses.

The blonde had a card. On one side was the cover of her book — the back of a naked woman with a horse tattoo, her arms tightly bound; on the other side was a quote from her racy novel about bondage and a picture of a red stiletto shoe. I didn’t have more than my normal business card. ‘For an older guy he’s pretty hot’, she continued.

The girl in front of us — her bangs ended in a purplish hue — raised an eyebrow. I said that Putin did feature in my story but not as a sexy dude. The girl gave me an approving glance. In her millennial- American-TV accent, she told me about her book, a young adult fantasy, and about her potential market. She seemed to know a lot. Even so, she said she’d fluffed her second interview. At least the first, with one of the YA editors, had gone well.

In front of her was the youngest man in the room, suave, chic. He had a card, also featuring the name of his book. And he was counting. With 27 minutes to go in this speed-dating, we weren’t all going to get our three minutes with the big publisher. I just made it. The editor’s skin glowed. Her job must suit her, I thought, and right now I wish it was mine. She was attentive, as she had been to all the ones before me. She asked a pertinent question about my approach to the tangle of material I was reeling off. It was going okay, I thought. Then I heard ‘ambitious’, a code word perhaps? Definitely. Politely, sympathetically, even ruefully, she told me her publishing house was too commercial for my project. My time was up; the blonde was next, with her raunchy offering to round off the event. That lucky editor’s head must still be spinning.

This was literary speed dating. A motley collection of wannabe writers, mainly women, some lugging shopping bags with their manuscripts, stood around in a bland hall waiting to sell their projects. Heart rates were high to start with, gradually lowered by the camaraderie of strange competitors. We practised on each other, then chatted, till the bell rang again, signalling our turn for a three-minute date. My first went quite well. I didn’t choke up; I think I got the idea across. We had a convivial chat all in 180 seconds! The second meeting seemed okay too. He asked if I had finished the manuscript. Not quite, I replied, immediately regretting my honesty, then thinking such an enquiry could be a hopeful sign? I wanted to think so. But as I went back into the bustle of late Friday afternoon on Broadway, I felt utterly drained. I’m still waiting for the call.

‘Community’ is one of those words that sounds positive. For some, it might convey a bit too much touchy-feeliness but like mother’s milk it is hard to dismiss as essentially a good thing. I live in Bundanoon, a small town which prides itself on its sense of community. I’ve had glimpses of it in the four years I’ve been here, from the fringes. I’m not much of a group person.

Yesterday, though, I got an insight into what gives community its good name. Two hundred of us, may be more, gathered in our memorial hall to farewell a bloke who had touched our hearts. Norbert Belley, 70, had died a fortnight earlier; the chemo killing him before the cancer could. He was gone much faster than anyone anticipated. His familiar scruffiness; that chortle from his roseate, unkempt face; the Croc shuffle: all gone from the café and the Men’s Shed and the community garden and the book club and the music gigs and, we learned at the funeral, from the sidelines of his grandson’s football games.

It was a community funeral conducted by Norbert’s brother-in-law, built to perfectly match Nobert’s petite sister Gabi. Others in the family put together the photographs revealing the young Norbert – he and Gabi had had a short-lived religious phase, noted one caption. Most of us had not known the adolescent, the merchant sailor, the air force signals operator. Norbert only arrived in the village five years ago.

The community gardeners did the flowers, huge swathes of wattle up on the stage where Norbert had sometimes acted in local productions and more often worked behind the scenes and afterwards to pack up the chairs and sweep the floors. The hall has always to be tidied up in anticipation of the next event: falls prevention classes aka Dancing with the Stars, Music at 10, the history group and garden club meetings, a film screening, the makers’ market and the community choir. The speeches were heartfelt, straightforward, all delivering the same message. Kindness and generosity count.

The secular ceremony was full of emotion and music. The Ecopella choir that had become part of Norbert’s life sang. A bugle played the Last Post while his RSL colleagues laid a poppy on the coffin, where his grandson had already put his rugby jersey. As they trooped past, I looked up again to those now familiar words above the stage, Lest We Forget, and those lists of names of boys from Bundanoon who did not come home from the First World War, and began to understand the essence of this word ‘community’. Here it means having time to help someone out, have a chat, share a beer and burnt sausage or a cuppa. His Canberra friend played the harp as Norbert left the hall for the last time.

The conversations over afternoon tea, brought by many friends and the local deli (Norbert would have approved of the spread), were convivial. People were pleased the celebration of an ordinary life had been pitch perfect. It had spread the seeds of kindness in the heart of the village.

‘We will always choose perfection over politeness.’ That, a German friend explained, is why a stranger sitting at the next table outside on a glorious spring afternoon got up, came over to me, took my cutlery and started to demonstrate how to deal with a Weißwurst. The skin must not be eaten. It must be surgically removed. The man assumed I spoke no German, though I was asking him, in German, why I could not eat the skin. He did not answer. His first incision was ragged; the skin did not peel away. The second was more successful. Satisfied, he had conveyed the lesson, he returned my knife and fork and resumed his seat.

Not knowing that I should only order these white minced pork and veal sausages, with sweet mustard and a pretzel before midday, I had done so at two in the afternoon: a light meal to keep me going after the long flight from Australia. I had started cutting the first of my sausages into pieces, offering a morsel to my companion to taste. Neither of us suffered from this first mouthful of white sausage eaten after midday with the skin on. Modern sanitation practices should have rendered the rule that no Weißwust hear the noon chime of the church bells obsolete. But traditions remain strong in Germany: there is a right and wrong way to do many things.

While the big guy from Bavaria – when he went to the bathroom his wife, in trademark German socks and sandals, sort of apologised for her husband’s intrusion and told me they came from Bavaria – felt no compunction instructing me in the art of sausage eating, it’s more usual for Germans to keep their distance. That we soon discovered when we, two Antipodeans, joined eleven domestic tourists in Leipzig. We were to be together for three days, discovering the city of Wagner’s youth in the day and attending his Ring Cycle in the evening.

Standing outside the designated building for our first encounter, I blundered in. A roly-poly, happy man from Frankfurt approached us, thinking we may be part of the Ring group. Yes, I said, proffered our names and asked for his. Roland was the only person to tell us his name. We spent the rest of the trip on no-name terms with our fellow Wagner fans. An architect from Berlin with a shiny bald pate and hip round-rimmed glasses – he had at least two pairs, one with bold red frames, the other tortoiseshell – exchanged a few jokes with us and showed us dozens of pictures of his house. His wife sported very shiny Egyptian-blue hair, short at the back with shaved zig-zags patterns. She wore only black and white clothes, usually with something polka-dotted. Avant-garde in appearance perhaps but both were as German as they come. When our guide — he didn’t introduce himself either – arrived, the first think Mr Goggles did was point out to the guide that his shoelace was undone. Perfection not politeness.

Rose Holley Special Collections Curator watches as Francesca Beddie opens the new Special Collections Repository

There’s a great sense of satisfaction when you come across the needle you have been looking for in a haystack of files. For me, the greater thrill is the unexpected gem that leads down new tracks and expands the horizons of the picture you are trying to put together.

In 1970, my father, Brian Beddie, left the ANU to take up the Foundation Chair in Government at the University of New South Wales at Duntroon. He retired in 1984 just before the new campus was opened. He used to quip that he’d spent his whole life in huts, first at Childers Street at the ANU and here in a row of green sheds on the ridge.

Last year I received an email from Paul Dalgleish Special Collections Archivist at the Australian Defence Force Academy Library about a set of papers the library had found – documents my father had amassed for various writing projects and lectures. Would I release these to the archive? I didn’t need even to see them to say yes but I did come to Canberra, where I met a tremendous team. We talked for much longer than either side had anticipated. Rose Holley, Special Collections Curator at the library, enthused about her plans for a new archival space.

Rarely does one hear these days of an expansion in library storage. Indeed, when my father died in 1994, we couldn’t find a library in Australia willing to take all the books he had collected on Max Weber. We mentioned this to Hans Brunn, who had been a young scholar Brian became friendly with at the Max Planck Institute in Munich in 1968. Hans was by 1994 a senior Danish diplomat – his and my paths had crossed again during the heady days of Baltic independence in the early 1990s. He found a solution. The books became part of the shipment of belongings of someone returning to Denmark from the Danish embassy in Canberra. From Copenhagen the books were sent to Riga, where the university was hungry for tomes to supplement its Marxist-Leninist collections.

Paul’s partner is Russian — another connection, made stronger by the fact that a few years after my father’s death I found myself here on this campus doing a research master’s on the missing bourgeoisie of early 20th century Russia. This came about thanks to an introduction by a school friend to an academic working here at the time. Her topic was, remarkably, late Russian imperial taxation systems. Who would have thought such paths would cross at a defence academy in Canberra!

Back to that first meeting with Rose, Paul, Annette McGuiness (UNSW Canberra Librarian) and Peter Stanley (research professor in history at Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society). As we spoke about the plans for the archive, I grabbed my chance to tell them about the boxes my partner, Peter Rodgers, and I had stored for over a decade. These were the papers of Peter Hastings, one of the most prominent journalists of his era, my father’s closest friend and Peter’s mentor at the Sydney Morning Herald. Peter had taken the files after Hastings’ death — he had a great book proposal to honour Hastings and his connections with PNG and Indonesia but could not find a publisher. So the boxes stayed untouched and unsorted.

I thought if my father’s set of papers qualified for the collection, so would Hastings’. But Rose made it clear I would first have to demonstrate that the papers were interesting enough and in an acceptable condition to be handed over. The archive was a mess but I found enough to prove their significance. Paul has found more gold for the researchers who will soon have access the documents now in miraculous order.

As well as material relevant to Australia’s security, the UNSW Canberra Special Collections include many literary files. Last week Nicole Moore (Associate Dean for Special Collections at UNSW Canberra) reminded me that the discipline of English has a long history here. In 1918, Leslie Allen became Professor of English at the Royal Military College at Duntroon. For those of you who know the ANU, Allen is one half, so to speak, of the Haydon/Allen building. Perhaps not surprisingly given the size of Canberra in the middle of last century, the connectivity continues. This track leads to the south coast of NSW. When my mother came to Canberra with Brian in the 1950s, she fell in love with the bush and the coast. She wanted a beach house and started combing the area around Batemans Bay. I gather my father was less enthralled but when he heard that Professor Haydon’s house at Broulee was for sale he mentioned it to her. She bought it and gave us and many others a wonderful haven. Professor Allen also holidayed at the coast, at Mossy Point across the bay from the headland where the Haydon house stood. The story goes that the two professors would sometimes finish their game of chess from their respective houses, signalling their moves using Morse code! Nicole has more to add to the seaside story: she can tell you about the logistics of getting books to Mossy Point for Allen to review when he was on the Literature Censorship Board.

Speaking of logistics, Rose told me she has become more knowledgeable than she ever expected to be about road and sea freight during this project, which has demanded precision measurements to ensure the compactuses and even their handles comply with the OH&S rules. She has suggested innovations to the company making the system – like the retractable handles — that will now be made available to other buyers.

ADFA and UNSW Canberra have come a long way from those green huts to having a state-of-the-art repository. What hasn’t changed is the spirit of inquiry that makes all those files so enticing. We are certainly very lucky that they are in such good hands.

[This is the speech Francesca Beddie made at the opening of the repository on 2 May 2018.]

I watched Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake again recently. Again, I cried. A sick bloke with talent and decency ends up dead before he can argue his case to be treated not as a client, customer, service user or national insurance number but as a citizen, no more no less. Surely our citizens can expect more from governments and public servants than mindless process and indifference. In the age of automation ought not compassion be precious? In the age of big data, shouldn’t it be easier to tailor public services to the individuals who pay, or have paid, taxes?

Worrying about this reminded me of an exchange I had with Donald Horne in 1996. Our letters were prompted by an allegation in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail that the historian Manning Clark had acted as a covert ‘agent of influence’ on behalf of the Soviet Union. There was no evidence to back the claims: fake news is not new. It was also the time of the first rise of Hansonism. I was angry that the Howard government was not standing up against ignorant racism and intolerance. Horne wrote back:

I keep having this fear that Australia (well – not Australia, but some bits of its public culture) will suddenly go mad, as the hidden rises to the surface – without the appropriate denunciations from the guardians.

Today, Horne might have concluded that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

What has caused the malaise in our polity and how we might do things differently is the subject of a two-part essay published inPearls and Irritations.

For many years I have introduced new entrants to the diplomatic service to the archaic language of third person notes or notes verbales. Some are enchanted by the trappings of their new profession; others scornful of the use of phrases like:

‘avails itself of this opportunity to renew the assurances of its highest consideration’.

I explain this usage as part of the toolbox of diplomacy which, along with protocol, can serve to contain heated emotion and temper hostilities. These have been the tasks of diplomats before and since the French coined such elaborate phrases centuries ago.

Now, when the talk is of a new Cold War, Australia’s Foreign Minister – some people call her our chief diplomat – prefers the TV cameras to the conventions devised to maintain lines of communication even during times of heightened tension. On 28 March she gave the Russian Ambassador what the media calls her ‘death stare’. Logvinov seemed to take this in his stride. He has even appeared to relish his on-screen performances.

This tit for tat isn’t over. Russia’s Foreign Minister had already reacted to the expulsions by Western governments of Russian diplomats by saying that Moscow will not tolerate Western countries’ crassness. ‘Rest assured, we will respond’, Lavrov told the Russian news agency, TASS. ‘The reason is that no one would like to tolerate such obnoxiousness and we won’t either.’

These slanging matches are bad for international relations. If we start to call people out before we have the facts* and prefer to conduct the business of foreign policy in the public glare, we abandon the professional foundations from which to prosecute for peace not war. That’s serious stuff.

Australia’s handling of the global refugee crisis confounds me. I cannot fathom how a nation of immigrants can be so manipulated by our politicians. They stir up artificial fears, pathetic fears when compared to the terror that compels people to flee their homes.

Facts and more facts about the horrors in Syria, the plight of the Rohingyas, the misery on Manus and Nauru can act as an anaesthetic. Art, on the other hand, can revive the senses.

That was my experience at Gardens Speak by Tania El Khoury, which I visited during the 2017 Adelaide Festival. Come with me to those gardens. First, enter the bleached forecourt of the tumble-down Queen’s Theatre, the oldest in the city. It appears abandoned. Is this the right place for the performance? A girl in the cool, dim foyer tells us someone will fetch us soon. Another willowy volunteer appears to lead us and ten others into a high-ceilinged barn of a building, alongside the theatre. As instructed, we take off our shoes, we put on disposable rain coats. What’s going on? We are handed a card with the name of someone who has died. It’s in Arabic. Our usher explains that Syrians bury their dead quickly. In wartime, it can be impossible to get to a cemetery for a funeral or to visit a grave. So, people are put in the ground at home, sometimes under a favourite tree, still close.

Our group is guided through heavy plastic curtains to a darkened part of this cavernous space. Twelve mounds of soil are arranged in two rows, each with a stake where a name is written. Using our cards to guide us, we find ‘our’ grave. We have to dig around in the dirt. One woman disturbs the solemnity, exclaiming concern for her jewellery. We are looking for a buried speaker. The volume is low so there is no choice but to lie on the mound with an ear to the microphone to be able to hear a story about war and dislocation, of fear and anger. Not all these people are innocents. My person – I confess, I have forgotten his name – tried to stay out of the conflict until it got too close. His own family members were killed. He entered the fray. He was shot.

It is not comfortable lying in the dirt, clean though it may be. Its earthiness and the intimacy of the listening and the gloom add a visceral perspective to the news we hear about Syria. But let’s not kid ourselves; we are still perfectly safe and soon we’ll be able to go for a cleansing ale. Our final instruction comes as we return to the vestibule to remove the coats and retrieve our shoes. We are given pencil and paper and invited to write to the relatives of the person we met on the other side, of the plastic sheet. Who knows if anyone ever received those letters. If they did, what did they think? Did they feel, just for a moment, a little less abandoned, a little more part of the whole human race?

A few weeks ago I went to another performance. Much less sophisticated, still raw. Suitcase Stories are vignettes written and performed by teenage refugees now living in Sydney. First, the actors offer us their childhood memories of accidents and illnesses and awkward moments. These lull us with their familiarity about our own lives. Who doesn’t know a child carrying a scar from a toddler mishap? Soon we are in new territory, where ISIS and soldiers, landmines and bombs shatter families, produce demons and desperation. All this is mimed by the group, dressed in plain red T-shirts and leggings. Crates act as the only props, turning from cars and tractors into beds where sleep is hard. Instead of counting sheep to help her nod off, one girl counts missiles, 429, 430, 431.

These are grim stories, some better written and spoken than others — English is a new language, a second, third even fourth tongue. Amanda tells of the Tuesday she went to the hairdresser. She was delighted by the result. As she preens, a bomb goes off. Hundreds are killed in the busy marketplace. ‘It was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.’

Anabella can’t act out her own story. Mariam takes her place. She’s at her uncle’s house. The phone rings. Something has happened. No-one will tell her what. She goes into the street where she overhears two people talking. That’s how she learns her father has been murdered. These are, we are reminded, true stories.

Finally and urgently these families flee; some must leave everything behind to escape the danger. They are now in Australia. In unison, the teenagers tell us they like Australia because they are safe, away from fear. Well nearly. In one of the final scenes Shukrullah and Saltanat discover a new enemy, a magpie, who swoops them daily as they walk to school. Kifarkis plays the magpie. He has a future on the stage.

Suitcase Stories is a production by Treehouse Theatre in Sydney. The theatre provides a platform for young refugees to share their life stories.